AndyM108

Andy, I think TCM showed The File on Thelma Jordan a few years back. Well, as you say, I guess it was 2008. Of course I had to not only watch it, but record it, as I am greedy for any and all film noir titles. I've recorded over 50 different Stanwyck titles since I got my DVD recorder in September of 2009, and since that month The File on Thelma Jordon has yet to return. After the SUTS showing in August 2008, it was played again in December of that year, but since then it's been AWOL and definitely due for a new engagement. I agree with you that Wendell Corey is no Robert Mitchum, but then again Corey was probably more believable as someone who could be taken in by Stanwyck. Older femmes fatales such as the then 43 year old Stanwyck wouldn't be as likely to sucker in some stud who would have had many more opportunities than someone like Corey.

By the way, who's the hoofer? My middle-aging eyes can't quite make him out. I hope he has frizzy hair under that checkered hat. Odds bodkins ! Here he is in a more dignified and recognizable pose:

If there's ever been a long-unscreened Paramount movie that's just begging for a repeat, I'd say it's Barbara Stanwyck's The File on Thelma Jordan, a film that lacks the co-star quality of Sorry, Wrong Number, but otherwise is far superior in every way. The last time I can find it in the old program guides is when Stanwyck had a SUTS day in 2008, and I'd say that six years is a long enough time for one of her top noirs ever to remain in exile.

For all those Preston Sturges films the TCM programmers select, they go to Universal to get them. Again, they could just as easily set those overplayed titles aside for awhile and get something else from Universal the fans want to see-- how about some more Mae West films, or some Burns & Allen films, or some W.C. Fields films, or some Alan Ladd films...you get the idea. I love Sturges, but I completely agree that his films have been way overplayed in recent years, not to mention the Paramount Marx Brothers. By contrast, I doubt if I've seen more than three or four W.C. Fields comedies on TCM in the past five years, and only two of them (The Bank Dick and It's a Gift) more than once.

My top 10 of the decade. I haven't seen enough movies since 1999 to compile a separate list for each year, but these ten are so damned great it's almost impossible for me to rank them. IMO every one of them is worth many repeated viewings. 1. Mystic River (2003) 2. There Will Be Blood (2007) 3. The Wrestler (2008) 4. City of God (2002) 5. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005) 6. Letters From Iwo Jima (2006) 7. The Gangs of New York (2002) 8. The Human Stain (2003) 9. The Lives of Others (2006) 10. The Departed (2006)

But "honey" I always associate with what husbands and wives in commercials for floor cleaner (or maybe breakfast cereal...some domestic type product, anyway) call each other. A generic advertising epithet. Hon, you must've never been to Ballmer.

I agree. While there are movies I enjoy more than "Citizen Kane," (but that's not saying I don't enjoy 'Kane,' which I do) I wouldn't bury it deep in this list or any "Greatest Movies of All Time" list (which is so subjective). What I love about 'Kane' is how the film was shot. I love Welles' use of camera angles and shadows as a means to subtly convey specific character traits, or moods, etc. While the plot is not the most original (definitely not a bad plot however and really what plotline is 100% original?) it is engaging and interesting enough to me to keep me watching. *IF* I were rating films purely on the basis of pioneering cinematic greatness along the lines you're mentioning, then I'd rate Citizen Kane much higher, up there with such previous entries as The Birth of a Nation, Metropolis, Sunrise, Fritz Lang's two Mabuse films, and many blockbuster movies of fairly recent vintage that I've yet to see. But when I rate movies, I can't see using merely coldblooded technical measures, like lighting, camera work, soundtracks, etc. I also want to see great acting and a story that grabs me underneath the dazzle. Sunrise delivers that, and certainly so does Mabuse, but the storyline Citizen Kane (to me, anyway) comes off as little more than a borderline bio of William Randolph Hearst with a bit of psychobabble added and most of the historically interesting parts left out. Welles denied that Hearst was the inspiration, but anyone who believes that must not know much about Hearst. And once you get past the camerawork and all that, and begin to consider the rest of the picture, Hitchcock's Vertigo is but one of many movies that leaves Citizen Kane in the dust. The Testament of Dr. Mabuse would be another. I wouldn't put Vertigo at #1, but I can certainly see a much better case being made for it.

I believe that in the best of all possible worlds we would all include a bare list and then provide relevant information below. It would in this way promote also how movies in the list compliment or contrast other movies in the list. Hey, if Chester Gould could invent two-way wrist radios, maybe TCM could figure out a way to link a person's list to a supplementary (and hidden) page of annotations and elaborations. That way people who only wanted to see the lists wouldn't be distracted, while people who were interested in the list maker's reasoning would be but one quick click away from further engagement. Just a (utopian) thought.

Sometimes I omit (and include) films for reasons other than like or dislike. In an upcoming list, I will put the most recent Indiana Jones film at the top. It is not my most favorite film of that particular year, but I think it is significant in that the producers opted not to use computer enhanced effects so that it would have the same feel as the earlier films made in the 80s. To me, that is groundbreaking, how a group of filmmakers decide to go against the tide and eschew modern technology so as not to compromise the tone of earlier works in the series. It takes guts to do that, especially when the temptation is there to use all these new-fangled bells and whistles. Interesting take, and I like your reasoning. Conversely, I have omitted films that I like from top ten lists, because I would have to make a top 20 to include every great worthwhile film from a given year (and I am not referring to 1939). I had a particularly tough time compiling my list for 1999-- AMERICAN BEAUTY did not even crack my top ten, and I like that film a lot, but I just felt the year's crop of movies was so good that there were a dozen films better than it was. That sounds like my problem with those lists from 1945 to 1950. But when you've got some people (like the two of us, along with several others) posting top 10 lists for up to 30 to 60 years worth of films, I think that these relatively minor idiosyncrasies kind of cancel each other out in the long run, leaving us with a pretty strong indication of that person's core likes and dislikes.

Just a quick glance shows many multiple showings for the same movie. Given that the biggest problem with The Essentials is that there's seldom anything new, this is kind of like adding insult to injury. It's one thing for movies like Laura, which seldom show up on TCM's regular programming, but the vast majority of these double (and even triple) dippers are movies that show up time and time again to begin with, such as His Girl Friday, Stella Dallas, and Bus Stop.

I was just noting that a list on its own does not tell me a lot about the poster's ideas and opinions about the films (or actors or music etc.) they've put on their list. It tells me a little, but not enough for me to know what they were thinking when they made up their list. Here are five different "top 10" lists from 1964, all taken from the "Underrated Sixties" thread. I'm not sure you can't tell a fair amount about what these five people look for in a movie, even without any commentary. You can also tell quite a bit from the omissions. Goldfinger A Hard Day's Night Becket A Fistful of Dollars The Three Lives of Thomasina Viva Las Vegas Father Goose From Russia with Love 1. Zorba the Greek 2. The Train 3. Dr. Strangelove 4. The Pumpkin Eater 5. The Seventh Dawn 6. Nothing But the Best 7. Seance on a Wet Afternoon 8. Seven Days in May 9. Zulu 10. The Night of the Iguana Mary Poppins My Fair Lady The World of Henry Orient Good Neighbor Sam The Three Lives of Thomasina The Yellow Rolls-Royce Dear Heart The Americanization of Emily Marnie Father Goose 1. Nothing But a Man 2. One Potato, Two Potato 3. Band of Outsiders 4. Dead Ringer 5. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg 6. My Fair Lady 7. Where Love Has Gone 8. Diary of a Chambermaid 9. The Naked Kiss 10. Fate Is the Hunter 1. TOPKAPI 2. MARY POPPINS 3. BECKET 4. THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA 5. THE AMERICANIZATION OF EMILY 6. RIO CONCHOS 7. THE PAWNBROKER 8. THE TRAIN 9. THE BEST MAN 10. THE VISIT

In one of my recent lists, I am ranking MONSTERS INC. right up there with GOSFORD PARK. What does that say about me?! Well, obviously it makes you a corporate monster! But more seriously, I don't think that we can tell much from a person's like or dislike of one or two particular movies. But I do think that it's not hard to tell from three decades worth of lists (that's 30 lists and 300 movies) that Jake, and you, and I are coming from three fairly distinctive places when it comes to the sort of movies we consistently seem to favor. Nothing judgmental about that, just observational.

Also, sometimes it is fun to read another person's list and try to guess or figure out why they rated something so high or so low. It gives you a window into the people you post with on a daily basis. I think that this works best on "list threads" like the ones you started about the various decades, since over the course of time on threads like those it's not hard to tell where a person's taste is centered. It's not too difficult, for instance, to look at my noir / foreign / "realistic" dominated lists, and figure out that I look for much different things in a movie than someone whose top 10 lists include lots of musicals, westerns, "adventure", and fantasy films. The more years a person includes his or her lists, the easier it is to make these sorts of inferences, and also to get an appreciation for the wide variety of tastes that bring themselves onto these forums.

I have to plead guilty as charged in many cases. In those "underrated" decades listings, I gave summaries and reasoning for my top 10 of each decade, but for individual years I just went with the list. I think for many of us it's a matter of simply not having the time, plus there's the fact that often I find that there's little response to lists supported by reasoning, especially if the movie is one that relatively few people have seen. I'd love to have people discuss the merits (or lack of them) of movies like Angi Vera or Scars of Womanhood or The Blue Kite, but I talk to myself too much as it is.

AndyM, you'd drop KANE ?!! Several hundred places ?? Yes, I would. I just re-watched The Third Man again last night, and I had the same reaction to both of those movies: Cinematically brilliant, and Welles has a screen presence that's unmatched by almost any actor this side of Toshiro Mifune, Jean Gabin or Jimmy Cagney. I can see why it's been dazzling critics for the past 73 years. But. . . but. . . once you get past all the technowizardry, IMO there really isn't much "there" there. The political points are trite, the characters are interesting but not nearly as interesting as those in many hundred other movies I've seen, and all in all it just seems a bit too self-congratulatory. Don't get me wrong, I still *like* both of those films quite a bit (I rate them both an 8 on my personal 10 scale). But give me a list of the TCM and Netflix movies I've seen over the past 5 years and in 20 minutes I could name 200 titles that I'd rank over both of them. It all depends on your criteria for judgment, but to me Citizen Kane seems like a bit of tasty fluff compared to films like Kapo or Greed or Bicycle Thieves.

We don't have enough foreign film stars in summer under the stars. I'd agree with that, but then considering that for the past three years we've had the two greatest male actors in history (Jean Gabin and Toshiro Mifune) in the lineup, followed by Catherine Deneuve, I can't say I feel like complaining too much. Just keep it up.

In the same vein as "Schindler's List", TCM recently presented another Holocaust based film, "Kap?" starring Susan Strasberg. And, while I'm glad I watched it and thought it a very well made film, I don't think I'll be looking forward to watching it again any time soon, either. Kapo is one of my top 5 films of all time, and while the "plot" is indeed grim and Strasberg is forced to make impossible choices in order to survive as long as she did, I don't find the movie hard to watch at all, because it expresses a profound historical truth and doesn't pull a single punch. No films as honest as that will ever find me flinching. What's much harder to take are movies made with a "message" that misses the point by so much that it's like watching a train wreck in progress. Mississippi Burning would be a perfect example of that.

I am sorry for not being specific enough. Yes, I mean people like Sinatra doing dramatic and comedic performances that do not involve any singing. And if you further limited the field to those who had already established themselves as *A-level* singers and had prominent non-singing roles in more than one subsequent movie, it would quickly narrow down to Sinatra, Garland, Robeson, Ethel Waters, Harry Belafonte, Crosby and Streisand. Though that's off the top of my head and I'm sure I've left some out.

I was a used book dealer myself for 23 years, and with that in mind I may want to add a point or two. I still buy about a book a week from either Amazon or abebooks, and while both are terrific sources, they each have their limitations. Amazon usually can't be beat for price. But with Amazon you're often in the dark about the condition of a book, and beware if that matters to you. Non-professional sellers often neglect to mention things like "no dust jacket", or "former library book", or "underlining in the text", and as a result I only buy an Amazon book from any category below "As new" if the dealer confirms that the book (a) has its jacket, ( isn't ex-library, and © has no writing inside. That may not matter to some people, but if it does, I'd be sure to ask questions and avoid having to return the book once you've received it. And if you want first printings (which is really what collectors are after), you'd better be prepared to ask questions not just on Amazon, but also on abebooks, since many an abebook that comes up on a "first edition" search doesn't bother to mention that it's a later printing. "First printing" always means "first edition", but not the other way around. Big difference to a collector. The saving grace to both of these sites is that they're both extremely customer-friendly about returns in the case of incomplete descriptions. In fact with Amazon, I've had several cases of wanting to return an underlined book, only to be told to keep it and be given a full refund. It's not as good as getting what you want, but at least you're no worse off than you were to begin with.

I can't believe that a soap operaish movie where the women all dress in pink and everyone sings to each other is among my favorite movies ever, but then The Umbrellas of Cherbourg so transcends traditional categories that it's pretty much a genre of its own. I could watch this movie once a year for the rest of my life and never tire of it.

It took a bit longer than 15 minutes, but it was worth it to opine on every sensible person's favorite film genre. Good luck on your MA.

I hope this isn't really about the time you wiped your muddy shoes on a Muslim prayer rug in Karachi.

There have been movies about other Olympic sports: The Cutting Edge (Figure Skating) Ice Castles (Figure Skating) Cool Runnings ( Bobsled) Miracle (Hockey) Downhill Racer (Skiing, previously mentioned) If it hasn't already been mentioned, I'd say the most widely viewed movie on the Olympics was *Chariots of Fire,* a 1981 film about two British runners in the 1924 Olympics, which won the Oscar for Best Picture.

I prefer the TV version with Rod Steiger I've only seen that version once, many years ago, and at that time I would have agreed with you. Of course both Steiger and Borgnine are marvelous actors, and physically suited for the part. Since then, I've seen the Borgnine version many times and can't imagine anything being better than that, but I'd love to see TCM get a hold of the Steiger version just to make the comparison. I think a lot of viewers who've never seen this "other" version would be in for a pleasant revelation.

"Darling" or "Dear" was mostly used by adult *daughters* when addressing their elderly parents. I don't recall ever hearing it used by their sons, either in real life or in the movies. What really seems strange is the practice of addressing one's parents by their first names, as if they were your siblings or your friends.